Coyote Blog

A few days ago, I pointed to a Tom Kirkendall post where he reported that a large volume of evidence, including interview notes with star witness and Enron CFO Andy Fastow, was finally turned over to the Skilling defense team.  This is required by law to occur before the, you know, trial itself but in fact comes months and years after the trial.  Apparently, there are a lot of bombshells in the notes, including this one as described by Skilling's attorneys in a brief linked by Kirkendall: (citations omitted)

Task Force prosecutors called the "Global Galactic"  document "three pages of lies" and the "most incriminating document" in  Skilling's entire case. At trial, Fastow testified Skilling  knew about Global Galactic because Fastow "confirmed" it with him during a  spring 2001 meeting. Skilling denied knowing anything about Global Galactic.  To bolster Fastow's testimony and impeach Skilling's, the Task Force introduced a set of handwritten "talking points" that Fastow said he prepared in anticipation of his meeting with Skilling. At trial, Fastow swore he "went over" the talking points with Skilling, including the crucial point "Confirmation of Global Galactic list." Id. In closing, the Task Force relied heavily on this document to corroborate Fastow's testimony that he discussed Global Galactic with Skilling.

The raw notes of Fastow's interviews directly impeach Fastow's testimony and the Task Force's closing arguments. When shown and asked about the talking-points document in his pre-trial interview, Fastow told the Task Force he "doesn't think [he] discussed list w/ JS."

This obviously exculpatory statement was not included in the Task Force's "composite" Fastow 302s given to Skilling. Nor was it included in the "Fastow Binders" the Task Force assembled for the district court's in camera review of the raw notes. It is not possible that this omission was inadvertent. Fastow's statement is one of the most important pieces of evidence provided during all his countless hours of interviews. Moreover, in preparing both the composite 302s and Fastow binders, the Task Force extracted and included other"”relatively inconsequential"”statements from the same interview date and even the same page of notes. The Task Force's exclusion of this critical piece of evidence for over three years is inexcusable and, on its own, warrants a complete reversal of Skilling's convictions and other substantial relief.

Disclosure: I actually worked with Jeff Skilling briefly at McKinsey & Co.  From that experience, I have always thought it unlikely that this incredibly detail-oriented guy did not know about a number of these key Enron partnerships.  However, that presumption on my part in no way reduces my desire to see him get a fair trial, and I am becoming convinced that he did not.

Bravo, Don Boudreaux (responding to the typical anti-libertarian attack that we are just "shills" for large corporations:

If I were a shill for industry...I would oppose free markets. Free markets, after all, are markets open
to competition that invariably keeps the profits of existing firms from
remaining excessive and, often, even bankrupts firms once thought to be
invincible industry leaders. Existing firms almost all deplore
competition in their industries. They seek government regulations that
hamstring rivals and potential rivals. And, of course, firms are
forever pleading for "protection" from foreign competition.

I just wrote a book ("Globalization") in which I make a strong and
principled case for completely free trade - not free trade sometimes,
for some firms, under some circumstances, with some qualifications, but
free trade always, for all firms, under all circumstances, and with no
qualifications.

Whether my book's case for unalloyed free trade is correct or not,
it is surely not the sort of book that causes the heads of many
corporate CEOs to nod in eager agreement. The typical reaction of
business people whenever they hear or read me make my case for
genuinely free trade is to say something like, "Professor Boudreaux,
you don't understand the peculiarities of my industry." And then each executive launches into a laundry list of excuses for why Congress should protect his industry from foreign rivals.

Guys, you may think you know what you want in a wife --  Is she hot?  Is she smart?  Is she funny? 

I can tell you from 18 years of marriage, this is what you really want in a wife:

Apparently, the 7th Harry Potter book will be split into two movies.  Great.  The second part will be killer, but the first will doom us to watching Harry run all over England camping. 

All the other crazy stuff in this story aside, there is no way that the man whose girlfriend lived on the toilet for two years is named "Mr. Whipple."

In a previous post I lamented that Eliot Spitzer was lauded by the press as "Mr. Clean" despite (or because of) abuse of power, but was forced to quit within days of revealing an episode of consensual sex.  If only abuse of power had such an immediate impact on politicians as sex:

The Justice Department and the housing department's inspector general
are investigating whether the [HUD] secretary, Alphonso R. Jackson,
improperly steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in government
contracts to friends in New Orleans and the Virgin Islands.

On Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers also raised concerns about
accusations that Mr. Jackson threatened to withdraw federal aid from
the director of the Philadelphia Housing Authority after he refused to
turn over a $2 million property to a politically connected developer.

Update:  More on the press and its support for prosecutorial abuse of power, in Spitzer's case and others.

The likely Republican presidential nominee is well to the left of the last Democratic president on economic issues.  And George McGovern sounds Laissez Faire:

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the
right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating
behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal
economics...

Since leaving office I've written about public
policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I've come to realize
that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to
maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are
helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don't take
away cars because we don't like some people speeding. We allow state
lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money.
Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don't
operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in
life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will
misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We
should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for
everyone else.

Really, its that George McGovern.

And David Mamet questions the power of government:

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations" - the
hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those
goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military"
of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and
women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a
very hostile world"¦

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the
answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From
experience"¦

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night,
and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower
Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why?
Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute - to throw into the pot
what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as
status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth
grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I
held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations,
the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong
and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other - the
world in which I actually functioned day to day - was made up of
people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort
by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace,
the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my
participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that
country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace"¦

The stories keep coming about using health concerns as the thin edge of the fascism wedge.  This time via Hit and Run:

Sheridan Communications and Technology Middle School
eighth-grader Michael Sheridan was suspended from school for three
days, barred from attending an honors student dinner and stripped of
his title of class vice president.

     His offense?

     He bought a bag of Skittles.

The punishment was meted out because the New Haven school
system banned candy sales and fundraisers in 2003 as part of the
districtwide school wellness policy.

In fact, this school has outlawed an financial transactions whatsoever between students:

Turner had repeatedly warned students that she would
not allow any candy to be sold in schools, nor did she want money
changing hands in school, said Sullivan-DeCarlo.

With Eliot Spitzer going down for what shouldn't be a crime (paying for sex) rather than what should be (abuse of power), now is as good a time as ever to focus on prosecutorial abuse.  As in the case of Spitzer, the media seems to have little desire to investigate overly-aggressive prosecution tactics.  In fact, in most cities, the local media cheer-leads abusive law enforcement practices.  It makes heroes of these abusive officials, whether their abuses be against the wealthy (in the case of Spitzer) or the powerless (as is the case of our own Joe Arpaio here in Phoenix).

Tom Kirkendall continues to be on the case of the Enron prosecution team for their abuses, which have been ignored in the media during the general victory dance of putting Jeff Skilling in jail and running Arthur Anderson out of business.  But, guilty or innocent, Skilling increasingly appears to have solid grounds for a new trial.  In particular, the Enron prosecution team seems to have bent over backwards to deny the Skilling team exculpatory evidence.  One such tactic was to file charges against every possible Skilling witness, putting pressure on them not to testify for Skilling.  Another tactic was more traditional - simply refuse to turn over critical documents and destroy those that were the most problematic:

The controversy regarding what Fastow told
prosecutors and FBI agents who were investigating Enron became a big
issue in the Lay-Skilling prosecution when the prosecution took the
unusual step of providing the Lay-Skilling defense team a "composite
summary" of the Form 302 ("302's") interview reports that federal
agents prepared in connection with their interviews of Fastow. Those
composites claimed that the Fastow interviews provided no exculpatory
information for the Lay-Skilling defense, even though Fastow's later
testimony at trial indicated all sorts of inconsistencies. 

However,
I have spoken with several former federal prosecutors about this issue
and all believe that the government has a big problem in the Skilling
case on the way in which the information from the Fastow interviews was
provided to the Lay-Skilling defense team. None of these former
prosecutors ever prepared a composite 302 in one of their cases or ever
used such a composite in one of their cases. The process of taking all
the Fastow interview notes or draft 302's and creating a composite is
offensive in that it allowed the prosecution to mask inconsistencies
and changing stories that Fastow told investigators as he negotiated a
better plea deal from the prosecutors. 

Similarly,
the Enron Task Force's apparent destruction of all drafts of the
individual 302s of the Fastow interviews in connection with preparing
the final composite is equally troubling. Traditionally, federal agents
maintain their rough notes and destroy draft 302s. However, in regard
to the Fastow interviews, my sense is that the draft 302s were not
drafts in the traditional sense. They were probably finished 302's that
were deemed "drafts" when the Enron Task Force decided to prepare a
composite summary of the 302's.

Note that showing how a person's story has changed over time is a key prosecution tactic, but one that is being illegally denied to Skilling.  Apparently Skilling's team has now seen the actual interview notes, and believe they have found "a sledgehammer that destroys Fastow's testimony" against Skilling.  Stay tuned, a new trial may be on the horizon.

This one comes via a reader, and is from Belgium:

Two sets
of parents in Belgium were recently handed five month prison terms for failing
to vaccinate their children against polio. Each parent was also fined 4,100
euros ($8,000)....

"Nobody
has the right to unfettered liberty, and people do not have a right to endanger
their kids," said John Harris, a professor of bioethics at the
University
of Manchester.

"The
parents in this case do not have any rights they can appeal to. They have
obligations they are not fulfilling."

Eliot Spitzer has been brought down for a crime most libertarians don't think should be a crime, by federal prosecutors who should not be involved even if it were a crime, and using techniques, such as enlisting banks as government watchdogs of private behavior, that stretch the Fourth Amendment almost out of recognizable shape.  So why are we libertarians so happy?

He routinely used the extraordinary threat of indicting entire firms, a
financial death sentence, to force the dismissal of executives, such as
AIG's Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. He routinely leaked to the press emails
obtained with subpoena power to build public animosity against
companies and executives. In the case of Mr. Greenberg, he went on
national television to accuse the AIG founder of "illegal" behavior.
Within the confines of the law itself, though, he never indicted Mr.
Greenberg. Nor did he apologize.

In perhaps the incident most
suggestive of Mr. Spitzer's lack of self-restraint, the then-Attorney
General personally threatened John Whitehead after the former Goldman
Sachs chief published an article on this page defending Mr. Greenberg.
"I will be coming after you," Mr. Spitzer said, according to Mr.
Whitehead's account. "You will pay the price. This is only the
beginning, and you will pay dearly for what you have done."

Jack
Welch, the former head of GE, said he was told to tell Ken Langone --
embroiled in Mr. Spitzer's investigation of former NYSE chairman Dick
Grasso -- that the AG would "put a spike through Langone's heart." New
York Congresswoman Sue Kelly, who clashed with Mr. Spitzer in 2003, had
her office put out a statement that "the attorney general acted like a
thug."

These are not merely acts of routine political
rough-and-tumble. They were threats -- some rhetorical, some acted upon
-- by one man with virtually unchecked legal powers.

Eliot
Spitzer's self-destructive inability to recognize any limit on his
compulsions was never more evident than his staff's enlistment of the
New York State Police in a campaign to discredit the state's Senate
Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno. On any level, it was nuts.

As I wrote before, the real crime here is that despite all his history, he was until two days ago a press darling labeled as "Mr. Clean."  In reality, he has always been Mr. Abuse of Power and Mr. Personal Vendetta.  I am happy to see him brought down, even if for the wrong reasons.

Update: A lot more here

Next in my series about the health care Trojan Horse for fascism, comes this story via Q&O in Canada  (McQ gives as good a definition of any of the Trojan Horse: "once government has control over your health care, it will use all
sorts of justifications and excuses to exert more and more control over
your life as a result.")

For 60 years or more, libertarians and conservatives have been arguing
that government programs intended to promote the public welfare
inevitably end by restricting freedom more and more: as the state does
more for you, it finds itself doing ever more to you. Who
would dare challenge that premise now, in the face of Judge James
Blacklock's decision? The man made no secret of the chief pretext for
his ruling. Motorcycle riders who don't wear helmets are more costly to the medicare system; therefore, in the name of reducing those costs, the government is free to require the wearing of helmets,
even if that conflicts with a fundamental Charter right and interferes
with the most personal and intimate sort of decision-making conceivable.

I posted this in 2004, but it seems relevant today:

OK, but what is this Antarctica thing?  Back when I was an undergrad
at Princeton, one of my fondest memories was of a bizarre Student Body
Governing Council (USG) election.  The previous USG administration,
headed by none other than fellow Princetonian Eliot Spitzer, had so
irritated the student body that, for the first time in memory, the
usually apathetic voting population who generally couldn't care less
who their class president was actually produced an energetic opposition
party.  Even in his formative years, Spitzer was expert in using his
office to generate publicity, in this case frequent mentions in the
student newspaper that finally drove several students over the edge.

The result was the incredibly funny and entertaining Antarctic
Liberation Front.  I wish I had saved their brochures, but their
proposals included things like imposing a dawn to dusk curfew on the
school and funding school parties by annexing the mineral rights
between the double yellow lines of the US highways.  All of this was
under the banner of starting jihad to free Antarctica.  The ALF swept
the USG election.  This immensely annoyed Spitzer and other USG
stalwarts, who decried the trivialization of such an august body.  The
pained and pompous wailing from the traditional student council weenies
(sounding actually a lot like liberals after the last presidential
election) only amused the general student population even further.
After a few student-council-meetings-as-performance-art, the ALF
resigned en mass and life went back to being just a little bit more
boring.

If you think I am exaggerating in saying that the Spitzer-led
student council types had a whiny reaction to this bit of fun, you
should know that Spitzer was still whining about it 20 years later to the New Yorker magazine.  Virginia Postrel, also a Princetonian at the time, had a similar reaction to mine here, and fisks the New Yorker article.

My novel BMOC included an incompetent and power-abusing Senator who managed to remain a darling of the press as long as he focused his attention on pork-barrel spending and using government power to help and hurt his friends and enemies.  However, the press finally turned on him when it became known he was involved with prostitutes.  The fairly cynical (if not realistic) moral was that it was fine to abuse government power, just don't get caught in a sex scandal.

Well, it seems that we will get to test that notion in real life.  Apparently, NY governor Eliot Spitzer has been dallying with prostitutes.  Now, I couldn't really care less about his purchase of sex -- I have argued many times for legalization of prostitution.  But it will be an interesting test of my book's cynical hypothesis, since to date the press has been in love with Spitzer despite (even because of) his abusive practices as AG and governor.  The radio news a few minutes ago actually said "Mr. Spitzer, who to date has had a squeaky clean reputation..."  Huh?  Only if you read the fawning PR work done for him by the NY Times in the past.

Update: Here is the passage from the book.  Sound familiar?

Taking a deep
breath, Givens said, "Senator, there is a reason that this one is not going
away. I will spell it out: S-E-X. The press doesn't give a shit about a few billion dollars of waste. No one tunes in to the evening news if the
teaser is "˜Government pays too much for a bridge, news at eleven.' The Today Show doesn't interview the
contractors benefiting from a useless bridge."

"However, everybody and his dog will tune in if
the teaser is "˜Your tax dollars are funding call girls, film at eleven'. Jesus, do you really think the CBS Evening
News is going to turn down a chance to put hookers on the evening news? Not just tonight but day after day? Just watch "“ Dan Rather will be interviewing
hookers and Chris Mathews will be interviewing hookers and for God's sakes
Barbara Walters will probably have a weepy interview with a hooker."....

"You guys in the Senate can get away with a lot,
as long as long as a) you don't get caught or b) the scandal is so boring or
complex that it won't sell newspapers. Hell, I saw a poll the other day that a substantial percentage of
Americans to this day don't understand or even believe what Richard Nixon did
was wrong. But if you polled those same
people, every freaking one of them would say that they knew and believed that
Bill Clinton got [had sex with] an intern.

Update #2: Disclosure -- I did not like Spitzer, even at Princeton.  This, however, was not uncommon.  In fact, Spitzer managed to inspire a jihad in response to his governance of the student council there.

Update #3:  ROFL!  I got this email from a reader:

I eagerly await your
comments on the latest imbroglio involving your favorite Princeton
classmate.  Please don't take the high road.

It seems I may not be the only person who does not care for Mr. Spitzer.

Update #4:  I hope the girls paid sales taxes on their transactions and have all their payroll taxes in order.  Certainly Mr. Spitzer has established the principle that illegal businesses still owe taxes.

That seems to be the axiom in New York these days, where Gov. Eliot L.
Spitzer (D), struggling to close a $4.4 billion budget gap, has
proposed making drug dealers pay tax on their stashes of illegal drugs.
The new tax would apply to cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and could be
paid with pre-bought "tax stamps" affixed to the bags of dope.

Update #5:  Libertarians like myself will point out that this is all between consenting adults.  Of course, that did not stop Eliot Spitzer from trying to prosecute Dick Grasso for a pay package that was approved by consenting (and quite sophisticated) adults.

Update #6: It is being reported that Spitzer will resign.  QED folks.  Spitzer uses the state police to spy on political rivals and the press continues to call him a squeaky clean reformer.  But pay for sex with a consenting adult, and your gone. 

Update #7:  Tom Kirkendal has been all over Spitzer for years.  He writes:

But I hope that the most important lesson that
Spitzer's political career teaches us is not lost amidst the glare of a
tawdry sex scandal. As with Rudy Giuliani
before him, Spitzer rose to political power through the misuse of the
state's overwhelming prosecutorial power to regulate business
interests. In so doing, Spitzer manipulated an all-too-accommodating
mainstream media, which never misses an opportunity to take down an
easy target such as a wealthy businessperson. Spitzer is now learning
that the same media dynamic applies to powerful politicians, as well. 

However, as noted earlier here,
where was the mainstream media's scrutiny when Spitzer was destroying
wealth, jobs and careers while threatening to go Arthur Andersen on
American Insurance Group and other companies? Where was the healthy
skepticism of the unrestrained use of the state's prosecutorial power
to regulate business where business had no available regulatory
procedure with which to contest Spitzer's actions?

The Mises Blog, not one to give the government much of a break, argues that the decision on home education last week in California was narrow and has been mis-interpreted, and applies narrowly to the credentialing of home tutors, not parents performing home-schooling. 

Maybe, but the teacher's union certainly thought that was what the judge was saying and the judge went out of his way to say specifically "Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their
children" which is an overly broad statement that was not at all required had the decision really been intended to be narrow.  Jeffrey Tucker at Mises argues:

It comes down to a case of a judge who got carried away with his rhetoric and didn't understand the law.

Oh, OK.  I feel so much better now.

If you have not seen it, the Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) reaction to a university employee reading a history book almost defies parody.  As far as I can tell, someone got offended or maybe was concerned someone might be offended because the Klan was in the title (notwithstanding the fact that the book is apparently decidedly anti-Klan).  This makes the whole "niggardly" controversy seem well-targeted in comparison.

However, I think Jacob Sullum misses the mark when he says:

To clarify, then, Sampson was not in trouble because of the book he
chose to read. He was in trouble because of what he might have been thinking while reading the book.

In fact, this is still not correct.  In fact, Sampson was in trouble because of what other people might think when they see him reading a book that has "KKK" somewhere in the title.  Pathetic.  Another lunatic step in trying to establish a "right not to be offended" at universities.

I guess it was inevitable, but a court in California has determined that the most basic function of parenting, ie educating your children, requires a license from the state.  If you don't have such a license, you have to turn your kids over to the state to educate them for you (via Overlawyered)

Parents who lack teaching credentials cannot educate their children at
home, according to a state appellate court ruling that is sending waves
of fear through California's home schooling families....

"Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their
children," wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed
by the two other members of the district court. "Parents who fail to
[comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal
complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to
imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and
counseling program."

Whoa!  No Constitutional right to educate our kids how we see fit?  With an imminent government takeover of our kids' eating habits as well, that will leave exactly what parental duties to parents? 

Of course we are just concerned about the well-being of the children.  Of course it has nothing to do with unionized teachers protecting their turf.  Or not:

Teachers union officials will also be closely monitoring the appeal.
A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said he agrees
with the ruling.

"What's best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher," he said.

Update:  It is being argued that this is actually more narrow than it first appears.  The current debate seems to come down to whether the judge is an idiot and the decision is overly broad or whether the judge is an idiot and the decision is narrow.

Every 2-3 years I do the math on solar cells for my home.  I live in a house with a large flat roof and in one of the top 10 cities in the world for solar potential, so it seems to make sense in theory.  Unfortunately, even with large government / power company subsidies, the math never works as an investment.

The problem for me is not efficiency - I have enough flat space on my roof for a lot of cells - but cost.  We need a solar technology that can be rolled out of the factory like carpet from Dalton, Georgia.  To this end, this looks promising.

I was driving back to Phoenix today from San Diego on Interstate 8 and I really needed my camera. 

As many of you in this area will have observed, the INS is out in force, setting up roadblocks and checkpoints on highways to look for illegal immigrants.  On top of our current rules requiring employers to act as immigration agents, our labor force is drying up in Arizona, making the search for workers harder.  That is why I thought it was hilarious that at the INS checkpoint near Yuma, the INS had a big sandwich-board type sign out front on the road saying "We're hiring!"

This is a great example of what I call cargo cult thinking:  If drugs are sold in small baggies, then banning these baggies will reduce drug sales:

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack
cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a
crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee. Ald. Robert
Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of
"self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,"
after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll
through a West Side park.

Great idea.  But it seems that Chicago may not be after drug dealers after all:

Lt. Kevin Navarro, commanding officer of the Chicago Police
Department's Narcotics and Gang Unit, said the ordinance will be an
"important tool" to go after grocery stores, health food stores and
other businesses.

Huh?  We need to "go after" health food stores?

This is the weirdest bit of problem-shifting I have seen since Oakland started assigning legal liability for teenage littering to the McDonalds corporation

I just bought a new Fujitsu Lifebook P8010  (which I love).  It came installed with a 90-day trial for Norton security suite.  Here is my observation on Norton:  It is hard for me to imagine a piece of spyware or malware that puts as many spam messages on the screen, exhibits so many bad behaviors, or is so hard to remove as Norton itself.  In the middle of a 30-minute task that was within 30 seconds of completion, Norton just rebooted my computer for some reason.  It spams me with messages every startup, keeps adding its own toolbar to my browser, and I am having a terrible time getting it off my computer.   Norton is perhaps the worst spyware I have ever had on a computer.  Except maybe for the McAfee trial version on my last laptop. 

Another fake memoir has been revealed:

In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published
last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white,
half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a
foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a
pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the
well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando
Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell
Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood
neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run
drugs for any gang members.

John Scalzi offers advice:

You know, the rules of a memoir are pretty simple. If an event actually happened to you, you can use it in a memoir. If it didn't actually happen to you, you can't. Because then it's fiction, you see. Which is different from a memoir. No, really; you can look it up. I'm not sure why this has suddenly become so difficult for everyone to process.

I must say that this actually sounds like a good book -- he should go for it:

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to selling my memoir of my
life as a teenage transvestite in the Bogota slums, who later joined
the Navy SEALs and adopted the twin daughters of the ruthless Afghan
opium warlord whom I battled to the death using only a spoon
and 14 bars of the 1812 Overture, and then, having beaten back a
terrible addiction to khat, went on to become one of the most famous
celebrity chefs on The Cooking Channel. Because apparently this would
be at least as true as most of the other memoirs on the market today.
And, I'd wager, a great deal more entertaining. I'm waiting for my
check, I am.

... because that may make it easier for the Democrats to summon the political will to kill ethanol subsidies, though don't hold your breath.  Certainly, though, the NYT, after years of cheerleading ethanol, may finally be coming around:

Congress must take a hard look at the effect of corn ethanol on food
supplies in the same way the new energy bill requires it to review the
environmental effects. It must move toward ending subsidies that will
become even more difficult to justify as oil prices rise and the costs
of producing corn ethanol decline. And it must press other wealthy
countries to do the same before hunger turns to mass starvation.

Via Tom Nelson

By the way, these problems with ethanol we are experiencing today were are inevitable as night follows day, yet we still had to blunder into it before we started questioning the economics.  The power of political correctness to trump science and logic is amazing.

I don't know why I can't just move along from Michelle Obama's rant about the terrible cost of her Princeton / Harvard Law degree.  Maybe its because I attended the same schools (different degrees) and my reaction is just so different -- I had a fabulous experience and live in awe that I had such a unique chance to attend these schools, while Michelle Obama seems to experience nothing but misery and resentment.  Granted that I did not have to take on a ton of debt to get these degrees, but I have plenty of friends (and a wife) that did.

This analogy comes to mind:  Let's say Fred needs to buy a piece of earth-moving equipment.  He has the choice of the $20,000 front-end loader that is more than sufficient to most every day tasks, or the $200,000 behemoth, which might be useful if one were opening a strip mine or building a new Panama Canal but is an overkill for many applications.  Fred may lust after the huge monster earth mover, but if he is going to buy it, he better damn well have a big, profitable application for it or he is going to go bankrupt trying to buy it.

So Michelle Obama has a choice of the $20,000 state school undergrad and law degree, which is perfectly serviceable for most applications, or the Princeton/Harvard $200,000 combo, which I can attest will, in the right applications, move a hell of a lot of dirt.  She chooses the $200,000 tool, and then later asks for sympathy because all she ever did with it was some backyard gardening and she wonders why she has trouble paying all her debt.  Duh.  I think the problem here is perfectly obvious to most of us, but instead Obama seeks to blame her problem on some structural flaw in the economy, rather than a poor choice on her part in matching the tool to the job.  In fact, today, she spends a lot of her time going to others who have bought similar $200,000 educations and urging them not to use those tools productively, just like she did not. 

Postscript: Ironically, two Ivy League schools have actually decided that they want their graduates to be able to afford any career they wish, without fear of student debt, and so endeavor to provide student aid nowadays in the form of grants rather than loans.  One of those is Princeton University, her and my alma mater.